What is Mass Consciousness? Does it Determine Elections?
Charles Jeanes 03 Sep 2015 The Nelson Daily
Mind
With Canada’s federal election machinery fully-operational, the references among politicians and media to “the public” and “the electorate” are seen and heard daily. “In the mind of the public” is a phrase also used a great deal.
What is this public mind? I know what I think is my mind. I know it is not a synonym for my brain, but is rather the “ghost” in the machinery of my grey matter, my neurons and all the marvellous bio-chemicals and connective links in that three-and-a-half pound organ. I have read the numbers: one billion neurons, one trillion connections among them, account for the biology of my brain, but the mystery of how it all works to produce human consciousness is still a mystery. The “I” who identifies himself as Charles is one of the effects of being conscious, or of possession of consciousness, for “my” brain. The hows and the whys of mind are not yet answered by neuroscience.
How does this individual meaning for “mind” carry into conversation about a public mind?
Foundations of human being
Let us dig into the idea of mass consciousness a little bit. Begin with the simplest definition of consciousness: “the awareness of being aware.” Or, from Funk and Wagnalls, “the awareness of oneself.” Descartes said it succinctly: cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.”
The human mind is peculiar. You feel, or you think, that yourself and your existence are “real.” Also, you “have consciousness” of being. These are key ingredients of a conscious human mind.
You know you live. You know you are mortal, you will one day die, if you are an adult human. You know what you need to keep the body alive. These are some parts of being human common to us all.
Another consciousness we possess is knowledge of other humans. You know the fact of being in relationship with other people. Other humans reflect our consciousness back to us.
The consciousness of being loved is so profoundly necessary to an infant human that babies can die for lack of love. I can say from experience that I feel a great difference in my being when I am in love and in a special relationship with one person, and when I am not. The consciousness of being in such a special “I love, and I am loved” relationship, is an ingredient of mind that in my opinion affects many, many spheres of one’s life on a daily basis.
Most salient of all in human consciousness is, of course, the “I.” How is a single self merged into a collective mind? Bees and ants have hive minds; it is genetically programmed into those species, all of which possess one queen ruling over the communication net that connects all the members. For this, the human species has no analog. We are not telepathic. I rather enjoy that fact.
“States” of Consciousness
Awake or asleep are two basic categories for our state of consciousness; conscious or unconscious are two others. Drunken impairment is a state of consciousness, being altered in one’s consciousness by a drug is another. These are the easy words and phrases we use colloquially about being conscious. There are no arguments about what the words mean.
What about “higher and lower” states of consciousness? Now the ease of understanding one another’s terms ends, when we start to compare and judge levels of consciousness. The masters of meditation in India have a vocabulary for states of consciousness that is not employed nor understood in Western neuroscience. This is a “grey area” for mind.
It is commonplace to hear people judge one another’s consciousness levels, as in, “what a huge ego that man has -- he’s not a very conscious person,” or “imagine the level of consciousness in such a materialistic person.” Another favourite polarity is “enlightened or not enlightened.” These comparisons are merely a way of establishing hierarchy; these are not labels helpful to understanding. (But the labels are a common type of commentary among people I know in Nelson.) Such phrases are evidence of a vocabulary for understanding that consciousness is a quality people have in different degrees. In poetic language, some minds are like clay, some are like lightning; there is no objective scale of measurement for describing the qualities of people’s minds, because consciousness is not a synonym for intelligence and is not weighed in IQ points. To judge another’s state by comparison with one’s own seems to me of little worth.
There is an enormous literature on the subject of states of consciousness in the individual and in an entire society, and it is an important corpus of research. Some thinkers hypothesize that a coherent, tight-knit society bound together in a distinct culture and small geographic space, might be able to manifest their political leadership and governing structures in a manner that mass, urban, socially-stratified people cannot accomplish. That seems intuitively sensible; perhaps ancient Celt or Israelite lords, American aboriginals and their leaders, or Tibetans with their Buddhist lamas, have ordered themselves in ways not accessible to Canadians in 2015. Therefore the relevance of studies of those societies to my question about a Canadian public mind, and its impact on choice of government in our electoral democracy, is not great.
Historical “stages” of evolving human consciousness
It is very important to my exploration of collective mind that there is a large body of writing about the human species evolving its consciousness over long epochs of time, attempting to assign descriptive labels to the stages of our consciousness in (pre)history. Primordial humans, hunter-gatherers, nomad pastoralists, agriculturalists, urban dwellers, are assumed to have possessed different kinds or stages of consciousness as their conditions of life and subsistence were altered. I have written at more length about this in several past columns, and named the foremost writers in the field: Ken Wilber, W. I. Thompson., Jean Gebser, Aurobindo, Don Beck, J. Rifkin. T. de Chardin.
The uses of the words (mass-) mind and (collective-) consciousness in historical discourse need to be noted, because they offer theories about what makes a collective or mass possess some unity in the mentality or psychology of the people of an historical period. The theories differ (each of the writers I named above put forward different theories) but all of them are evidence that scholarly observers of humanity possess a consensus: we can write and speak as if “collective, mass consciousness” has a meaningful application.
A very widely-held perspective on human civilization holds that for each major tradition – The West, China, India, Islam, Judaism, pre-Columbian America – there are categories for their peculiar consciousness. The West has a blend of the Hellenic (Greco-Roman) and the Semitic (Abrahamic/Mesopotamian) mindsets or mentalities, with large fractions from the Teutonic-Celtic northern world, in its consciousness. It is a loosely-used phrase, and it is not exact in meaning, yet the notion that there is a “Western consciousness” needs to be noted.
As well, one can see that intellectual historians refer to Ages of the human mind with words like classical, medieval, modern, and post-modern, and write books describing a “mind” of the Middle Ages, or the Victorian age, or the age of the scientific revolution. Historians of ideas and culture, social historians and historical sociologists, have a community of understanding about public, mass, collective consciousness in a society: it exists. The basic hypothesis for all such writers is that human societies can meaningfully be said to possess within their culture, their civilization, an encompassing collective mind among all.
The language(s) one speaks is also, by the consensus of a multitude of academic researchers and scientists, an enormously-significant factor in the formation of human consciousness. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is a prime example of research in this field.
An historical materialist, also known as a Marxian thinker or Marxist, would insist on adding that social class is extremely significant in determining which type of consciousness any particular individual in a society might possess. I am still sufficiently Marxian in my thinking about politics to agree with the latter: there is one consciousness for the ruling strata of any society, the elite culture, and another one underlying it among people who accept the elite’s rule but have a different consciousness of politics.
An individual like myself who is deeply steeped in academic knowledge of the historical record of how Western civilization evolved, “possesses a consciousness of history.” That is peculiar to me, my education and my passions, but unless the great mass of Canadians are very similar to me in this regard – and I have reason to know they are not – this type of personal consciousness will not have an impact on how Canadians choose governments. My “liberal education” is elite, I cannot deny it. I will say more about this in the next section.
So, enough said about how historical eras and epochs possess a unity of consciousness among all the minds of people living together and knowing themselves to belong to a society, to a religion, to a civilization, to a culture. I think I have explained the point effectively to readers.
I take this consensus view as a solid reason for me to speculate that a Canadian public mind exists. The collective consciousness of Canadians is “manifested” in the governments we allow.
Ideologies, Beliefs, Creeds, Philosophies
As I wrote above, Cultures and Civilizations possess broad collective consciousness across the minds of all the human individuals within their societies. Religion is one of the great shapers of a collective mass social consciousness. So are ideologies, creeds, and philosophies. When very large numbers of people profess a belief in the same creed or ideology, then we feel justified in saying there is a collective psychology among those people.
Christians for example profess faith that Christ is the Saviour of human souls, and scientific materialists agree that science has answers to the most important questions humans have about existence. Being a Marxist/Leninist/Maoist is a political religion. Declaring oneself a devotee of quantum physics, or of a guru or yogi, or of Plato/Kant/Descartes, are equally definitive statements about the thoughts that shape your mind and structure your mental universe. All are ways in which one uses words and ideas to describe who “I” am, to identify my “self,” to make my mind “mine.”
Before leaving the description of making a mind with thoughts and feelings, I have to at least nod in the direction of the esoteric traditions that teach that we have all lived lives before this one; karma might explain a life for some individuals, magical, divine, demonic and irrational forces explain it to others. Before we are incarnated to the physical bodies we now exist within as a self/soul, we lived other lives; I have watched closely as my grandson born 14 months ago has come from beyond the Veil and slowly but surely grounded into his material being. My role in his formation as a human is something I am taking rather seriously.
Call me a credulous fool, but it has to be admitted that besides the scientific, secular, materialist, and rationalist inclination of modern Western minds in wealthy developed nations, there are many other ways to understand human existence, many other ways to create one’s individual conscious mind. Philosophers, mystics, messiahs, prophets, priests, scientists, have this one thing in common: they intend to instruct individual human beings how to understand life. An understanding of existence is a basic ingredient of a mind; there may be no other part of self that is more foundational to forming one’s mind. The human species appears from much evidence to absolutely need meaning and purpose in order to live comfortably on this plane.
Knowledge, Information, Memories, Expectations
I confessed above that I own an elite liberal education. Education is an enormous ingredient in the construction of an individual consciousness. If I am asked about my personal interior mental universe, I would begin with the people I know and love as part of my “subjective reality” – and then I would describe my knowledge, my experiences, my ideologies to explain the mind I have constructed on the foundation of my inherited DNA, my brain, my species. I would say, “I live in the consciousness of being positioned in time because I am passionate about History.” I think daily about the human prospect on a global scale, I ponder the “Direction” of human development and the “Meaning and Purpose” of human life on planet earth – I would expect that any regular, attentive reader of this column would have figured this out about the author of such writing as they have perused here. This is the curse of an intellectual temperament, a temperament partly inherited and partly generated by my experiences of living. As I say to my friends, I agree with Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living” – and I add that examination of my life has to include examining human history. And I have to be honest that it is possible to over-do this perspective: “the over-examined life is not worth living” either.
From myself outward to the wider world of my society, I proceed to say that every individual has the same ingredients to make up their unique selves. Knowledge acquired by formal study and personal interest, information stuffed into our minds from a universe of accessible media, never before available to humans up to this moment (and daily increasing), memories of our own experience and acquired memory of the history of our people and of many other people, and expectations about where this species is heading in future – all of these phenomena are ingredients combined within the consciousness of one individual human being. From this mix of fact and idea, thought and feeling, we create our unique individual mind and self. Some like me examine this all the time, if they are privileged with leisure and absence of anxiety, and many are not in the least so inclined (as I am) to be constantly contemplating self and society.
But I think no one disputes that after one’s birth on the planet in a physical body, the material world and the facts one “takes in” to one’s mind, through the five senses and through the sense of reflection and understanding, are placed upon the original mind each of us is born with.
The Individual and the Mass: the sum of all selves = the social collective
My consciousness is unique to me as my ego is, but despite my unique peculiarity, I am just as much a part of a mass collective consciousness as any other Canadian. There is a core around which we are all constructed.
We approach more closely to the meaning of the public mind and the expression of that mind in the government voters choose in an election. But how can one arrive at a statement about the public mind of Canadian voters? Modern, affluent, educated, multicultural, pluralistic societies like Canada’s in 2015 are famously resistant to dissection into overarching narratives. There is no reason at all to expect that we are united by a common knowledge of Canadian history, by religion or culture, or by political ideology. What useful generalizations will be possible about us is a very hard question indeed.
The hypothesizing of a Canadian collective consciousness, a public mind of the electorate, is the attempt to generalize about the essence or core or common denominator that unites all Canadian individuals. It is not a hypothesis about what describes our common humanity, however. It is an hypothesis about our common political behaviour. It is an hypothesis about why we manifest the people who will be our governors, how we accept the institutions and laws we obey as legitimate, and the language we use to talk and think about government. The hypothesized public mind of Canadians voters is a general statement about our society, our economy, our culture and our ideology as ingredients of “constructed reality.” A constructed reality is not the same as the reality that materialist sciences (physics, chemistry, biology for example) describe. It is the reality we make by a “contract” to understand things in the same way. Our money system is a constructed reality; paper money has value only because we agree to accept it. The public mind is the creator of the political order of Canada, of our ruling elite.
Public mind and voter behaviour: Harper wants to make you happy
All of my observations and arguments offered to this point in the column have been set forth with the aim of answering whether the phrase, ‘Canadian public mind,’ can be said to have an effective meaning for the choice of our next federal government. I think the phrase is an approximation of a phenomenon that decides elections. It is public mass consciousness that makes sense of the old saying, “People get the government they deserve.”
What are the ingredients of the public mind of Canadian voters in 2015? What are the values we think we live by, and what parts of our lives do we expect government to direct to the goal of our greater happiness?
“Happiness” is the key word here. That is what we want in life. Peace of mind, contentment, a feeling of satisfaction and self-worth, are other ways of saying happiness. Happiness is thus the highest value we profess as a public good.
The ideas of pursuit of happiness and the greatest good of the greatest number are rather recent in human history as a mass social perspective, dating to the time of the American Revolution, Britain’s start toward an Industrial Revolution, and the evolution of rationalism and utilitarianism as the dominant modes of thinking about politics. That was the age of the Western Enlightenment, the century of the 1700’s, the time of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Bentham, Smith, Jefferson and Paine, Kant and Goethe.
Thomas Jefferson was very much a man of the Enlightenment, of Rationalism. His was the mind that penned the American Declaration of Independence, speaking of the rights of the People to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Life and liberty seem self-evident in meaning, but what is pursuit – not achievement, you notice – of happiness in actual practice going to look like? Jefferson may not have meant to prescribe how to pursue happiness. In practice it came to mean pursuit of security and comfort through material means, and by means of rational, good, democratic government, in popularly-chosen institutions and laws.
Steven Harper understands the materialist concept of happiness. The economy is practically all that he believes he has to serve, with some attention to his ideology for war on crime, war on terror, and war on drugs. As far as paying attention to the intangibles of democracy and the ethics of honest government, he appears from the evidence to care very little.
A choice of Harperite conservatism by Canadians would mean, for me, that Canadians want more than anything to have the high material standard of living that recent history, since the Second World War, established as our entitlement. We will never fear for our safety from a foreign enemy invading or bombing us, as we have not feared since 1945. We will never fear a too-small supply of food and water for our needs; hungry years like the 1930’s will never come again for Canada. We will always have the most-modern and scientific methods of medicine, and we will always have access to enormous amounts of information in our media and in our educational systems. We will always have leisure to pursue holiday travels, hobbies and passions away from our workplace, and always have liberty to worship our private deities with public tolerance. These are the great foundational facts of the good life of a Canadian.
For all of these things to go on being true, we need money. Money comes from a job, and a job comes from making oneself employable by someone else, or by being self-employed. And so, the economy is the base of our understanding of happiness, no matter how often we repeat the lines that “money cannot buy happiness” and “what does it profit a person who gains the world but loses their soul?” Economics rule us still. Harper means to present himself as the leader who secures our jobs, our incomes, and therefore, our happiness.
Conclusions: parties serve; the ruling class rules
In a column this Spring I laid out my understanding of politics. I am convinced intellectually by a class analysis of political sociology; there is a ruling class, and most voters are not in it. Still I believe the three parties, which all serve the ruling class by keeping the rest of us in order, have significant differences. The Conservatives materially and substantially have policies and ideologies at odds with what I believe are the best interests of Canadians.
Harper must go. Your vote against Harperism is important. It will not revolutionize our society and economy, as we need. But the difference between a Harperite regime and any other will be noticeable in ways I hold to be formative for a worse Canada, or a better.
Originally posted by lce:Best is that keep religion out of politics
Concur.
Best is that keep religion out of politics
Try to. Collective consciousness or mass consciousness is a subject that is discuss and debated in Buddhism. It is part of the teaching of the ‘Mind Only’ Buddhist school.
I shall continue to post all topics that are related to, concern with or can affect Buddhism directly or indirectly.
Something like the political atmosphere in our region?